How Docker Eliminates Local Development Pain and Streamlines Your Environment

Before starting development you often have to install many tools and services, which leads to dependency problems, environment‑variable issues, port conflicts, compilation‑library errors, and other pain points.

During development you may need additional services, re‑configure environments for each project, and face inconsistencies when teammates use different operating systems. Even if everything works locally, deploying to a server can break because the production environment differs from the development one, forcing you to repeat the same setup work for every new project.

What is Docker

Docker is an open‑source container engine that lets developers package applications and their dependencies into portable containers that run on any Linux machine, providing isolation through sandboxing.

Benefits of Docker for Local Development

Trial and Error

Docker lets developers quickly spin up environments with a single command, avoiding the need to manually install and configure each tool, which saves valuable time.

Unified Development and Production Environments

Using Docker, the same container image can be used on Windows, macOS, or Ubuntu, and if the production environment also runs Docker, the exact same image can be deployed, eliminating environment drift.

High Performance

Containers are lighter than virtual machines, consuming less memory and starting in seconds, making the development workflow feel seamless.

Showcase

Containers can be packaged and shared without requiring the recipient to configure anything, ensuring demos run reliably.

Install Docker

On macOS download the Docker dmg, double‑click, and drag it to Applications; Windows follows a similar process.

https://hub.docker.com/search/?type=edition&offering=community&q=

After installation run docker version to verify:

Client: Docker Engine - Community
Version: 18.09.0
API version: 1.39
Go version: go1.10.4
Git commit: 4d60db4
Built: Wed Nov 7 00:47:43 2018
OS/Arch: darwin/amd64
Experimental: false

Server: Docker Engine - Community
Engine:
  Version: 18.09.0
  API version: 1.39 (minimum version 1.12)
  Go version: go1.10.4
  Git commit: 4d60db4
  Built: Wed Nov 7 00:55:00 2018
  OS/Arch: linux/amd64
  Experimental: true

Install docker‑compose

Docker for mac includes docker‑compose. For other platforms download from the GitHub releases page and verify with docker‑compose version:

➜  ~ docker-compose version 1.23.2, build 1110ad01
docker-py version: 3.6.0
CPython version: 3.6.6
OpenSSL version: OpenSSL 1.1.0h  27 Mar 2018

Download Laradock

Clone the Laradock repository:

git clone https://github.com/laradock/laradock.git

Configure the .env file

Copy env-example to .env and adjust paths: cp env-example .env Set APP_CODE_PATH_HOST to your local project directory and APP_CODE_PATH_CONTAINER to the container path. Enable Xdebug by setting PHP_FPM_INSTALL_XDEBUG and WORKSPACE_INSTALL_XDEBUG to true if needed.

Run Containers

From the Laradock root directory execute: docker-compose up -d nginx mysql This builds (if necessary) and starts the containers in the background. The following containers are launched:

nginx

php-fpm

workspace

mysql

The -d flag runs them detached; the command combines build and start on the first run.

Configure the Web Project

Example Laravel .env settings:

DB_CONNECTION=mysql
DB_HOST=mysql
DB_PORT=3306
DB_DATABASE=blog
DB_USERNAME=root
DB_PASSWORD=root
...

Note: the database host must be the service name (e.g., mysql), not 127.0.0.1 or localhost.

Configure Host on the Host Machine

Add a virtual domain to /etc/hosts:

127.0.0.1   blog.test

Configure Nginx

Copy laravel.conf.example to blog.conf and edit server_name and root:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name blog.test;
    root /var/www/blog/public;
    index index.php index.html index.htm;
    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php$is_args$args;
    }
    location ~ \.php$ {
        try_files $uri /index.php =404;
        fastcgi_pass php-upstream;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        fastcgi_buffers 16 16k;
        fastcgi_buffer_size 32k;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        fastcgi_read_timeout 600;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }
}

Access the Application

Open http://blog.test/ in a browser. The page loads correctly (image omitted).